ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I'm Arlene Avakian. I was born in New York City, April 4th, 1939.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. Thinking about the home where you grew up as a young child, can you describe some of your very earliest memories?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

My father was an immigrant and my mother, she wasn't a refugee, but she was a survivor of the Armenian genocide. She came here when she was around 10, I think.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

We lived in Washington Heights in New York, in a five-room apartment that was always full of people. At one point, I think there were 15 people living there. My early memories are just being surrounded with people. But it wasn't the kind of warm and fuzzy household that people would imagine. If I say this to people,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

they're like, "Oh yeah, you're so lucky." You know, but my mother was a genocide survivor and my grandmother lived with us, she was also a survivor. She actually saved them through luck and grit, and she was very cold. My aunt, my mother's sister, is the one who was emotionally connected. My father was very passive. He was an immigrant from Iran.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

He came here to go to college. He went to Colombia. His family were rug merchants. And I thought that they were just middle-class people, but it turns out they had a lot of dislocation too. They were Armenians in Iran and

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Turks made incursions into Iran and they had to flee. So, there's a lot of trauma there.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And how did your experience of the world

LUCY MUKERJEE:

change when your brother was born?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Yes, enormously. I was the first child on the East Coast born to this large Avakian clan, my father's family. So, I had lots of attention. Then my brother was born when I was six and a half and my world changed. I say I became a feminist at that point, but of course I didn't have the language for it -- But I noticed, and actually, this is

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

interesting; when my mother was in labor, I was with an older cousin of mine, a girl who I was close to, she was quite older than me. When we heard it was a boy, we were devastated and I don't think it's because we wanted a girl as much as we knew

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

that it was gonna make a difference. We never talked about it, but that's my sense of it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Can you talk about some of the ways in which this was a very conservative household?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What were some of the attitudes and beliefs that you were aware of as a child?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Well, my mother's family was from Turkey, and they were Armenians in Turkey, but they were part of Turkish culture, even though they were discriminated against. They spoke Turkish and they were in Turkey. And Armenians also are extremely conservative,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

having to do with gender. I think part of it comes from trauma. You wanna conserve what you have and if you wanna conserve what you have, family is the thing you wanna conserve. I wasn't allowed to go out to play every day. My mother didn't want me to be on the streets. It was a very safe neighborhood, Washington Heights in the 40s. I had to struggle for everything,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

every bit of independence that I got. Part of it, I think she was controlling because of her own trauma. But part of it was, that's how the family was. You're supposed to be with your aunts and uncles or cousins and not supposed to be on the street with anybody. So, it was very conservative in so many ways. I was growing up in the 40s and it wasn't exotic or sweet or interesting to be different.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I wanted to be an American, whatever that means, whatever it meant to me at the time. At the time, that was also very conservative. Post-War women at home taking care of the children and waiting for the husband to come home. It wasn't as if my family was conservative and the American world was not, they were both conservative, but my family

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

was even more conservative. Like, it was a struggle to shave my legs, to wear makeup, to do any of the things that girls did.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You talked a little bit in your pre-interview about wanting to pass, and I think you mentioned this in your book, wanting to pass as American and that sort of eagerness to assimilate. Can you expand on that

LUCY MUKERJEE:

a little bit here?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Yeah. I mean, there wasn't diversity at all in the 50s, in the representations of America, and I'm just using America in quotes. So, my goal was to be as close to those representations as I possibly could. And part of that meant not speaking Armenian because Americans don't have two languages.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

If you have two languages, you hide it. Although my friends who were Greeks spoke Greek, so that was helpful, but I still didn't wanna speak Armenian, and I didn't want my brother to speak Armenian. My parents never went to the movies, I wanted them to go to the movies. At one point, I thought Americans have attics with their history in there. I didn't say it that way, but I think

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

that's what I meant. And, of course, we didn't, we had nothing like that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And was religion a part of your upbringing?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Strangely enough, no. My parents belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church, which was a few blocks away and Washington Heights at that time was a Middle Eastern neighborhood. In addition to other groups, Irish were there, Greeks were there and then in

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

the 50s, Puerto Ricans moved into the neighborhood. The church is still there. I lived on 190th street, and it was on 187th street and my grandmother went to church, but the church was a very long service in ancient Armenian. Even though I was fluent when I was a kid, I couldn't understand anything. We never talked about religion.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I don't think my parents were believers, but they weren't non-believers. And I said, that was the one thing I was saved from, kind of a militant Christianity.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What were the expectations placed on you by your family when you were coming of Age?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Well, that I would be obedient. That family would be the most important thing in my life,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

the extended family, as well as my nuclear family. That I would go to college, there's no question that I would go to college, and that I would get married and have children. I wanted to say too, I mean, there were very strict gender norms, there's no question about that. However, I got married because it was the only way I knew to

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

leave my family. I was desperate to get out of the clutches of my family, particularly my mother who was very controlling. But none of the men in the family left their nuclear families until they got married. So, there were gender norms and there was much more freedom for men, but still there were restrictions.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. Who do you feel were some of the biggest influences on you in those formative years?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I would say the biggest influence in my life was the civil rights movement, and I'm enormously grateful for that. I was married then, but still formative. It meant so much to me to see people who I

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

knew were oppressed standing up for themselves and, I thought, standing up for the country. So that really shaped who I was, I think. Earlier, I wanted to go to the big city high school that was two blocks away. It was George Washington high school.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

My mother wanted me to go to Hunter, which was a city school, but it was a special school. And I was of the times, I really stood up to her and said, "I'm not going, you can't make me go. I'll walk towards the subway and then I'll just not go to school." Then she said that George Washington is half Black because Harlem didn't have a high school at that time, and probably still doesn't. The kids came to George Washington,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

it was a few subway stops away. I went to George Washington, but I wanted to be just ordinary. It was part of my assimilation, to be ordinary, to not stand out, but I was in the honor class, so I wasn't like in the general population. The honor class, of course, was completely white, which I didn't notice.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

But being in that high school was really important to me too. And then my parents moved to New Jersey in 1954, the same year The Blackboard Jungle came out, which was a book about big city high schools. And the first day I was in that school, I was put in detention. I didn't even know what detention was. I came from the honor class and I said, what is this? They said, well, we're just teaching you

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

city kids a lesson. I was treated differently because I came from the city and it was 11 miles away, but it was a world away. So that was really formative, and helped me to understand what it's like to be treated like the other. So that was really important too.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You grew up in Washington Heights until your early teens, and then you moved to New Jersey. Can you paint a picture of these very different neighborhoods for us?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Oh, I loved living in New York. I loved it. I had a lot of friends. i didn't when i was younger because my mother wouldn't let me go out and you know the whole outside of the family world was inside the family and outside the family and outside the family was

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

you know maybe dangerous but certainly not something you wanted to do but by the time i was in sixth grade i had a lot of friends most of them were Greek Jewish people from the neighborhood. And we kind of owned the city, it was great. We take the bus or the subway downtown and spend time. Had all kinds of ways to put off men who were looking at us.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

We talked about one of our fathers who was a cop and it was wonderful. I loved it. We walked places. We went places. We had places to go. Then my parents moved to the suburbs. First of all, there were no Greeks there, there was some Jews, I guess, it just seemed very homogenous and I didn't have the word waspy then, but that's what it was like. It seemed to me that everybody was blonde,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I'm sure they weren't, but that's what it seemed to me. And there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. From my brief experience with the students in the school, they were much more sexually active than my friends in the city. We came from like -- Middle Easterners, we would kiss and that was it. But in the high school, I moved to, like

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I would say, upper working-class town. But the high school we went to had a lot of upper-class people, so they were rich people there. And it was a world that I knew nothing about and I couldn't get into. I was out. But I went back to the city all the time, but I hated New Jersey.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I say I was exiled in New Jersey.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Would you describe yourself as a rebellious teenager?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Yes. It was the only way to survive. This is my grown-up self talking now. If I didn't have anger, I don't know where I'd be. I'm really serious about that. Being able to express my anger, and my mother was angry, so I could do it, even though girls are not supposed to be angry, but she was angry.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And she had a lot to be angry about. But I think after my brother was born, I just started screaming. "I hate you. I hate you." That turned into, "I'm not going to the high school you want me to go to." "I'm doing this," "I'm doing that." "I'm wearing these kind of clothes." My mother wouldn't buy me clothes, even though they had enough money. They didn't have a lot of money, but they certainly had enough money to buy me clothes. So, I got a job after school

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and I bought my own clothes and then she would complain about my clothes. And it's like, "I bought these with my own money." So yeah.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Who was your closest friend or ally in those years? Do you remember?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

In New York, I was close to a group of girls. I always had a boyfriend too though.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And we hung out, we were close, so there was Thalia and there was Rachel. Rachel went to a different high school though. She went to a specialized high school for art. It wasn't music and art. I forget what it was. When I moved to New Jersey, I had a friend who was a male who was not in high school. He was older and he liked jazz and I liked jazz,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

so we would share that a lot. I didn't really have friends in the school. I mean, there were people I knew, but nobody I felt comfortable with. I would go to the city every weekend.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I noticed on the book in your memoir you talked about your friendship as a teenager with someone called susan and how you were both tomboys and you paint a really very picture of queer style there of what you wore in

LUCY MUKERJEE:

those days can you share that image?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Yeah. I forgot about my cousin Susan, because she became very conservative, politically, extremely conservative, and anti-feminist. I think she was gay. I think she was a lesbian. I wouldn't say that I felt any sexual feelings towards Susan, but we were tomboys together and I had never thought about it, that that's a

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

kind of a lesbian thing, but that's interesting. I'll have to think about it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What's your first recollection of seeing someone who identified as queer? How old were you?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I was 34. Just a few months before I fell in love with Martha, my partner, a good friend of mine came out and I felt attracted to her.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I think that just allowed me to feel attracted to her, but I really fell in love with Martha and she was my only partner. At the time, I referred to myself as a lesbian, but I always felt that I was bisexual. I don't think of my past as a thwarted lesbian. I understand that, but

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

it wasn't my experience.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. Let's go back a little bit to -- You are ready to get out of the house and build a home with your new husband. How did it go when you were telling your parents that you were moving out and getting married?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I just think they had to accept it because I was so rebellious. They knew they couldn't stop me.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

But here's how conservative the family was: I told my parents and they said that I had to ask my father's older brother, because, in the hierarchy, he was the one who was taking the place of the father. Of course, the father had been dead and was in Iran, never came to this country. Neither did the mother, so it was a

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

formality, but I had to do it and I actually liked my father's older brother quite a bit, so it was okay. They told me I shouldn't get married, and I certainly shouldn't get married to somebody who's going to graduate school because we would be poor. And I was like, well, I'm not into money. By then, it was the beginning of the 60s. Yeah. It was the 1960s. It was before the 60s,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

but I was kind of thinking of myself as a Bohemian, which is what we would have called people who were critical and resisting, but I didn't have the guts to actually live that life.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And how old were you when you became a mother?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I was 21. I didn't wanna be pregnant. I had a diaphragm

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

that didn't work. I had been married a month or two before I got pregnant, I wanted desperately to have an abortion, desperately. It was very difficult and I had no idea how to be a mother. I never felt loved by my mother, so it was extremely difficult, and I would've had an abortion. My son turned out to have

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

to be on the spectrum. He had some learning problems and emotional problems, and I had no help with that. And of course, not only did I have help with it, I was blamed for it. The idea was that I was a refrigerator mother and I was very cold. I didn't want the baby. I didn't know how to love him.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

So, it was tragic for me and for him. He eventually lived on his own and he was a loving, wonderful person. But early years were hard and I had a lot of guilt over that. Even though I didn't cause it, I didn't help things along. He was born in '61, so at the time,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

nobody knew anything about Asperger's or the spectrum. It was a hard time and I had no help. I mean, my ex, his father would've institutionalized him, and I said, "Over my dead body." I would say this to doctors and teachers, "Tell me what he's gonna be like in five years. If you can tell me that,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

then I'll consider it. But he's been progressing and certainly he'll progress more in his family than in an institution." So, while I didn't have that emotional connection to him, I had the kind of mother bear, 'this is my child, you can't do this.' So yeah, that worked in his favor.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And were you able to talk to your children about their Armenian heritage to sort of break the silence that you had experienced?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Not until much later,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

not really. I hadn't faced that I was the child of survivors when they were born. And I had no idea what that meant. All I knew is that we had a secret and my grandmother told me the secret, probably when I was 14, I don't know. She kept saying, "I have a story to tell. I'm gonna tell you a story, my story."

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And she prepared me for years. Then she told me that they had been living in Kastemonu. A city or town, I don't know, but I have since been there. She said that they came and they took my grandfather and she never saw him again. Then they came and they closed up all the Armenian homes and gave them one room to live in. Then she told me they took them on a cart

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

to the interior of the country. And then I think she told me at the time it was Daday, which actually is a place. Then they came and they took my uncle who was eight. There were 12 of them. She had three kids, the sister-in-law, I think had three kids. I forget who all else was there, but there was a group of Armenians that they took this way. She left her children and

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

went to this town where they said that they were taking him. Which meant that she had to somehow traverse the mountains, it is a very mountainous area, at night. She bartered to get a Hajib, which worked

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

in her favor. She found him and said, "I'm gonna come and get you." Then she went back to Kastemonu, where she was from because the police commissioner had been a friend of my grandfather's. Before the genocide, in some places, there wasn't a strict separation between Armenians and the Ottomans. It's Ottomans, it's not the Turks.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

So, he said, "I told you that you had to become a Muslim. But you said you wouldn't, but now if you agreed to do that, I will get your children. I will get you and your children back to Kastemonu." That's how she got back and saved everybody. But since, I wondered why did they take her on a cart? Why didn't she go on a death march like most of the other Armenians?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Why did she survive? Who was this police commissioner? Was his grandmother an Armenian? Did he have Armenian blood? There's so many questions that I'll never get answered. But that was the story. It took me years, years, years to begin to assimilate what that story meant. When I heard it, I didn't wanna hear it. It was bad enough being the other, I served didn't want to be identified with

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

people who were murdered just for who they were.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Was your mother and your grandmother able to have a relationship with your children?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

My mother did, and my father. My kids were very fond of my father, and my mother. And I also fled from the family. I didn't just flee from my nuclear family,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I fled from the family because on both sides, there was so many demands. So, they didn't have cousins. I feel guilty about that, but that's what I had to do at the time. They would go away with my parents during the summer. My mother would always say, "Why don't you come?" My father would mostly say that actually. And I'd say, "No. I think I'll take the time without the kids."

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You have to do what you have to do to survive.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Right.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I understand. Do you remember at what point you discovered feminism and women's liberation?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Absolutely. I remember when I discovered feminism, I was about 24 and I read about it, I think. I was living in Wisconsin then, in a small city in Wisconsin, not Madison. It was very conservative

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and I heard about it. I had two kids by that time, and I thought wow, if this had come around when I was younger, it would be really great, but I'm too old for it now. I was 24 years old. Then we moved to Ithaca, New York and there was actually a small women's movement there. I got totally involved, totally involved. And I felt like my life had been saved by feminism and it was, it really was.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Can you expand on that a little bit? What were you discovering? Who were you hearing from? What was changing your perspective on life?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Well, I was a wife and mother and the women's movement said, you don't have to be this. You can be something else. The women's movement basically said, your life is not over. I got involved in women's studies and I remember going to a women's studies conference,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I think it was in Pittsburgh and I saw a Taekwondo demonstration and I thought, oh my God, women can do that. I mean, there was so much that being a woman was outside of the purview of who you could be. Then I came home and I joined a Taekwondo

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

class, and I was so out of shape. I could barely do it, but it's just the small things and the large things. My life totally changed. I think you'd have to know what it was like growing up in the 50s to know what it meant for somebody like me to encounter the women's movement. Everything was possible. I never wore skirts. I always wore pants. I did what I wanted.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I mean, I really was finding who I was and who I could be. Not only who I was, but who I could be. Then I decided to go back to school to get a graduate degree. Eventually the marriage broke up, which was a very good thing. He was a passive man,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

"feminist", but he was undermining all the time and he was abusing our daughter, I found out years later. So, it's even hard for me to talk about him, but on the surface, he looked like the perfect male, for a feminist woman, but it turned out he's evil.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

So you went back to school to continue your studies was that

[inaudible].

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

No, I was accepted at University of New York in Binghamton, but I decided to move. I had a former student who was a very close friend and she really influenced me a lot. Her name was Brenda Verner and she was African American from the south side of Chicago and had been involved in Black nationalism in the Black arts movement. She came to

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

go to Cornell, to the African American studies program. Africana studies program, it was called. But she didn't get in. So, she got to Ithaca college where I was teaching a freshman English course. Anyway, she said to me, "I'd been up all night, I've been thinking about this and you need to leave Ithaca because you are his wife." And this time I had no idea what he had done to Leah. "You need to go to a new place."

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I was thunderstruck, but because of the women's movement, I thought I could do it. I moved and there was a very strong woman's movement here, in what's called the Pioneer Valley. I applied to UMass to the history department, got in and I got a TA job. I was involved in women's studies at Cornell,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

so I was immediately put on the faculty Senate committee Women's on the Status of Women, the women's studies subcommittee. I immediately made those connections, but it was hard being a single parent. It was hard coming into a context where everybody was expected to be a superwoman because of the women's movement. You were supposed to be able

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

to raise children, go to school, cook dinners, keep house. Not cook dinners. I take that back. Do everything and do it in stride. One day, I was walking across campus and I saw this woman and I said, "Oh, I haven't seen you for a long time." She said, "I collapsed." And I thought, I'm really sorry she collapsed, but I'm really glad she told me, because this is hard. Meanwhile, you're changing your life,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

but it was the best thing that ever happened to me, moving. I found a therapist for Neal, my son, and there was this really nice woman who happened to be there, who worked with the woman he was seeing every week. We started hanging out and we did that for a year,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and then it became more than that. And we were together 42 years. It was hard, she never wanted kids. I was afraid to be totally out with them. That was hard for her. We were as different as you could be. You could not imagine two people more different. She was from the South. She was a therapist.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I'm from New York. But immediately, we could dance together. But we shared values.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What drew you to her?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Pardon?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What was it that drew you to her? What did you admire about Martha?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Oh, I just felt wonderful when I was in her presence. It wasn't intellectual.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

It was . . . she was kind, she was caring. I needed a place to rest and she was that and more. But she saw me, she cared about me. I mean, I had a lot of friends. I'm not saying I was alone, but an intimate relationship with somebody looking out for your welfare and sharing things with you was new to me.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

So was it that relationship, the beginnings of that relationship that allowed you to find the language to describe who you were?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Oh yeah. Yeah. well, it was before, when I was attracted to my other friend, but once I fell in love with Martha -- But I called myself a lesbian because politically I thought that was important at the time. We got together in the fall of '74,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

same time the women's studies program at UMass was born. It was a long time ago. One of the reasons I really wanted to do this interview was to talk about the lesbian in community here in the Pioneer Valley, because it was the most difficult community you ever wanted to be involved in, and Martha and I were not involved in it at all.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

We were very isolated. It was really fascistic. You couldn't be friends with a straight woman. I mean, there was such rigid definitions. I knew about that already, I grew up like that, and so did Martha -- coming from a very small town in West Virginia. If you had a male child, you had trouble. If you were in a monogamous relationship, you had trouble. And I know it wasn't

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

just here, it was what happens when you are suppressed for a long time and you come out like that. But it was very difficult. We never really felt part of the community. Eventually, we put together a group of friends, lesbian and straight and had a community of our own, but we never really related

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

to the lesbian community. A good friend of mine wrote Undoing Monogamy, Angie Willey. And has a chapter on Alison Bechdel. I could never read Alison Bechdel because it was so far from my experience. It's what I would've wanted, to be part of the community, of course, because I came from extended family. So, I was always trying to recreate that.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

But this was as bad as my family.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Too many rules.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Too many rules. Too much judgment. And there were a group of lesbians who lived out in the hilltowns saying that they weren't gonna take any money from the man and all of this. And some of them were in trust funds. Like, really? Not them man, but your man, your father.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

So, it was a difficult time.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

But you created your own group of friends.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Yes, we did. And when my daughter was sick and after my son died, we had enormous support, enormous support. It worked, but it wasn't that ready-made, "This is who you are. This is who you have to be. This is how you have to dress.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

This is how you have to treat your son." It's inhumane. So that's my little speech.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. You mentioned that you had the gift of 42 years with Martha. What did she teach you about yourself and how to be a good partner?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Well, she was in an apprenticeship with a Jungian analyst.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

She had a master's, but the Jungian stuff came from this woman who was quite amazing. So, if you think about the Jungian framework, whether you're thinking type, sensate to feeling or intuitive. Martha was a feeling intuitive, I'm a thinking sensate,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

so we're opposites, just opposites. And we both learn from each other. The example I always give is when we first got together, we went to the movies. Okay. I remember The Rose, which was about Janis Joplin. A very emotional movie and I'm watching the way I watch, I'm analyzing the movie while I'm watching it, like, "Well, why

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

did they do this? Why did they do that?" It's just the way I think. It's just the way I think. It doesn't mean I'm smart. It's just how my brain works, how my being works. So, we come out of the movie and Martha's crying her eyes out, and I said, "but this is this, and this is this, how can you," and we had a huge fight, a huge fight.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And we fought all the time because we didn't understand each other. I learned that I had to let her have her feelings and then we could talk. But I also learned about my own feelings, which were quite repressed. I learned about my feelings by being in, I would say, a deep relationship with somebody. I mean, some relationships, people kind of go along each on their own track, they're alike. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

but it's not what we had. We fought a lot. We interacted a lot. We clashed a lot. So, both of us changed. I would say, and when she was sick, we have been through so much, both of our kids died. And then about 10 years later, she got cancer.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

We still fought a little bit, but there was so much of a deep connection that I was able to take really good care of her without one bit of resentment. I'd get tired, all of that, but the love was just so strong. And I think part of it is that we actually did grapple with each other and some people couldn't stand to be around us because we were always fighting.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And we tried to not do that because it's annoying to people. But it was a very deep relationship. My life was changed and so was hers. It was really an equal relationship, and we fought about that too. But when we first got together . . . here's the thing, I was heterosexual until then

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and I thought, oh, this is gonna be perfect, right? I'm with a woman, everything's gonna be equal. That was one of the problems in the beginning because I was crestfallen when it wasn't perfect.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How was Martha really with your family?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I had very little relationship with my -- You mean my parents?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Well, I'm estranged from my brother. We don't speak. He stole quite a lot of money from me and still complains that he's the victim, so I finally ended my relationship with him. Here's an interesting thing, he came to visit and he was just complaining, and I didn't wanna bring up the fact that he stole money from me, but he knows that that's what I think he did, and that's what he did. I have documentation.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

He started complaining about his wife stealing money from him and I said, you better get another topic. And then when he left, I said to Martha, this is the last time he is gonna cross his threshold. I have enough pain. This was after my kids had died. It's like, why do I wanna be with him? So, I wrote him an email and said, you did this, this, this and this and this. And I never wanna see you again.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And she was furious with me for a week, furious. "You don't do this to family. How can you do that? You're so selfish." And I was like, "Yes, I am selfish." She got over it, but that's the kind of difference, really deep difference. Finally, she saw that that was what I needed to do. Her relationship to my family . . .

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I had a very distant relationship. She was nice to them. They were nice to her. Though my father didn't like her. She always said, my father didn't like her. My father was a very passive guy. It's hard to even tell when he doesn't like somebody. But then when my book came out and I came out in the book, well I was out in my life. I just wasn't out to my parents.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I wrote my mother a long letter and said, you might have difficulty with this book because it's about how we argued. But it's really about the arguments that immigrants and their children have with each other. It's about us, but it's also about more than us. Then I said, "You know this already, but

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Martha and I are in a relationship." She wrote back and she said, "We knew, but it was hard on your father." Typical. We never talked about it again. And then when the book came out, she never commented on it, ever. When I cleaned out her house, after she moved to an assisted living place, the book was nowhere to be found.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

So, she threw it away. But the first four chapters were published in this Armenian magazine. She read those and she called me up and she said, "We never favored you. It was the Avakians who favored boys. Why didn't you tell me?"

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I said, "Ma, I was a kid. I was six and a half." So, Martha became very close to my children and my children to her, eventually. She was their parent longer than their father. Then when Leah remembered what her father did to her, she was estranged from him,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and we told Neal too. But he continued to have a relationship with him, but I wanted him to know. It was hard. It's just hard. But Leah, she was also an amazing person. She was a brilliant writer and an incredibly loyal friend and a wonderful daughter. Tough. She had run away.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

She had a drinking problem, which she dealt with. There was a lot of pain in my life, and a lot of joy.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you for sharing that.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Oh, and I wanted to say that having Neal really began my political education because nothing was

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

made easy for him. There weren't services he needed. He would be in a regular school, off in a classroom, or he'd be in a school integrated in the classroom, but his needs were never met. And I write about this in the book, which no one really commented on, which I thought interesting.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

It just gave me another view on the world and how it was for people who are not in the mainstream. That, in addition to my views on civil rights, as we called it in those days, now we call anti-racism and white supremacy, really shaped my politics . . . and gender too. Of course, I forget to say about that

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

because it's so obvious.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Well, that takes us very neatly over to talking about your accomplishments as an academic. So, let's see, you've obviously had a very impressive career as an academic, and I wanted to start by asking who opened the doors that enabled you to step on that path?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I'm trying to think how I decided to go to graduate school. I remember now I read a book by Eleanor Flexner who was a scholar who wrote history of the suffrage movement, and I was like, this is my history, even

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

though my parents weren't here when this was happening, but it was my history. I thought, I need to know more about this and I need to go to graduate school. I want to. Sad to say there was no one in the history department at UMass who inspired me. Since I had a job with women's studies, I considered it part of

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

my job to try to connect with women's studies, I mean, African American studies, so I decided to sit in on courses that they were teaching, sit in the back, just learn. I asked the faculty if I could do that. I became very close to some of the faculty and while they weren't exactly my teachers, although I sat in on some of

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

the courses they taught, they inspired me and it was perfect because I was interested in Black history and women's history and the connections between them. They were very influential. Johnnetta Cole, who became the first president of Spelman college, a traditionally Black women's college in Atlanta, and John Bracey, who

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

is still teaching in African American studies at UMass. He's a historian, she's an anthropologist. So, I would say academically, they were the people who guided me and they were both on my doctoral committee. I got a master's in history and learned nothing that I wanted to learn. I mean, it was awful. It was really, really awful. And I was not great at it because this is not what I want.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And then I got involved in this project that a couple of faculty -- They wrote a grant for this project called "Black Studies, Women's Studies and Overdue Partnership". It was Margo Culley from UMass and Johnnella Butler from Smith college. It was a Five College project, two-year faculty development project. I was the

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

staff person at that time in Women's Studies, and I said to myself, you've got to get a terminal degree. You're in an academic setting, you have to get a terminal degree. I heard about something that was happening at the School of Ed. So, I became a doctoral candidate in School of Ed and Johnnetta and

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

John were on my committee. And they said to me, separately . . . I had breakfast with Johnnetta, and then we went into the orals. This was before my orals. Johnnetta said, "You really need to think about an autobiography." I said, "What are you talking about?" And then we went into the orals and John said, "What do you wanna do for your doctor and for your dissertation?" I said, "Well, I wanna find a particular

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

moment in US women's history where race is absolutely central." And he said, "You need to write a memoir." I said, "What is wrong with you?" What I realized was that I had been telling this story about how the civil rights movement gave me the courage and the language to think about my life as an Armenian.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And that had been so powerful in my life. They wanted me to write about that, and that's what I did. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do. Feminists hated it, Armenians hated it, women's studies people hated it, but it was a wonderful thing to do. Some people liked it. No. I would say that John and Johnnetta were absolutely central, and Black Studies, the whole field of Black Studies

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and Women's Studies, and that kind of connection between Black Studies and Women's Studies. . . I guess, in that project, the most interesting thing was the fights or the non-fights, or the things nobody could talk about, particularly the white women. I'm just reading a book now called The Trouble with White Women, and I love it. I just love it. It's wonderful.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Oh, just that that's still a very relevant topic today.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Before Kimberly Crenshaw coined the term intersectional analysis, a lot of women of color were doing just that. June Jordan, for example, was in the "Report from The Bahamas" is all about an intersectional analysis, put in an absolutely

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

poetic, wonderful 10-page essay. The Combahee River Collective. I mean, I got my inspiration mostly from Black people and I won't say people of color. I did that too, but mostly it was Black people. And so, I was trying to bring race into the center of women's studies, and that was basically impossible.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I mean, there was a lot of lip service, but it was impossible. So, when I became chair, it was my goal to have a department that was a majority women of color working on women of color, not just people who represented groups of color, but whose research was on women of color. And I accomplished that and that changed everything.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Now, race is in the center of that department, alongside of gender. It's not displacing gender, it's enriching it. I feel very good about that. And the other thing in terms of my work, that was absolutely astounding after my kids died, it was 2008.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

My daughter, Leah, had leukemia. She got leukemia in 2006 and she was in remission and then she had a relapse and she had just had a bone marrow transplant and my son was hit by a car. The bone marrow transplant was -- I can't remember the exact sequence, but in 2006, she contracted leukemia. In 2008, in January, he was hit by a car and he

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

died and then she died in June. Somewhere in September, or maybe later, I don't remember. Sometime after they died, I got this email

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

from somebody named Ayse Gul Altinay, I didn't know if it was a man or a woman, from Turkey, asking me to present a paper at Hrant Dink Memorial workshop on Gender and Ethnicity in the Former Ottoman Lands, and it came from Turkey. I almost deleted it. I read it four times and I looked her up. So, it turned

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

out she was a woman. She had a PhD from Duke in anthropology, and she had written a book on militarism in Turkey, which I knew that was quite dangerous to do. And I also knew that Hrant Dink was an Armenian journalist who had been assassinated in 2007. And so, this conference dedicated to Hrant Dink also intrigued me. I didn't know anything

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

about him until he was murdered and it was on the front page of the New York Times. There were pictures of Turks holding signs, throngs of Turks, thousands, holding signs. "I am Hrant Dink" "I am Armenian", So his death sparked the modern Turkish movement for Armenian and Kurdish rights. I was meeting Martha and we were going to New York, so I just turned off my computer, and it

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

was before I had a smartphone, so we're going to New York and I had completely forgotten about it. Oh, I wrote back and said, "Oh, well, yes, I might consider it. But all my work is on the Armenian genocide," which was a lie. I closed my computer. On our way to New York, about half an hour into the trip, I said, "Oh, guess what?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I got this email from Turkey wanting me to come to Istanbul." And she said, "You're not gonna go, are you?" I said, "Well, maybe I don't know." I came home and I found this very, very carefully worded email from her saying, "Oh, of course, we know all of your work is on the genocide. We know your work. There will be other Armenians here." And I thought, this is the way I would speak to a woman of color.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

So I wrote back and she had sent me some stuff to read, which was really interesting. I said, "Well, maybe I'll consider it." She sent me the program and it looked amazing, and there were other Armenians, other people speaking on Armenians. Then I said to Martha, "I'm gonna go but I don't want you to come. You don't have to come." And a friend of ours sat us down, a young friend who had

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

been through a lot, said to Martha, "You have to go because she will experience things there that she will not be able to tell you about, so you have to go." Luckily, Martha went and it was amazing. It's really hard to even -- I mean, I've written about it, but going there and hearing Turks talk about

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Armenians, and being with Turks who I could connect with, and some Armenians but mostly Turks, because there were very few Armenians left after genocide. It was really amazing and I became -- Well, that was the first year. And then I went every year. I went to Turkey nine times in 10 years

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and Martha too. Martha would say, I'm here more than I'm at home. But I think that that experience has been very, very powerful for me and Ayse and this other woman, who's amazing, Fethiye Cetin, whose grandmother was taken off the marches when she was eight and raised as a Turk, as were hundreds of thousands of Armenians, mostly women.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Her grandmother told her when Fethiye was in her twenties that "I'm Armenian" and she didn't tell anyone else. Anyway, Fethiye and I met each other at that first conference. And Ayse helped us get to know each other by the next year, inviting us to a breakfast and translating because Fethiye doesn't speak English. I don't speak Turkish. We don't have a common language, but the three of us are in the final stages of a book of conversations. And it's not about reconciliation. It's nothing to

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

do with it. It's about our politics, our politics on gender, on race, ethnicity a little bit about sexuality. It's those politics from our different locations and our different generations. We are three different generations. Ayse is about to turn 50, Fethiye is in her mid-sixties, and I'm 82.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

So, it was a wonderful experience. I don't use this term much, but it was very healing. I feel like I'm really settled now with being an Armenian and being the survivor and a child and grandchild of survivor's and victims of the genocide. I've written a lot on that too, so that feels wonderful, but this connection of the three of us is just really wonderful. And it came at a time

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

when my life had been severely diminished, so that's been really important.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's very beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And it's so wonderful to hear that you have another book coming up soon.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Hopefully, yes. It's very difficult because Ayse is the only one who can do the translations and things in Turkey are not easy. So, yeah.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I think it's important to note that you've really helped shape the concept of women's studies as a legitimate field. And I'm wondering if you can think back to what that was like early on in your career and how it's evolved over time.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

That's an interesting question because I was the Executive Director of what was then called Female Studies at Cornell.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Cornell was so conservative and the women there were -- I don't know how I end up with these -- There's just a lot of conservatives around and I'm lucky enough to be around them. Anyway, at the time, I had been, as I said, very influenced by this woman from Chicago, this African American woman who was an older student, but she had been a student of mine just for a little while. And I wanted, at the time,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

to not just put women into the regular curriculum, but to change it, to change the curriculum. Not many people were talking about that then. There were some, I wasn't the only one. And I wanted to bring race into the center, always. So, I was basically fired from that position.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I wasn't very effective. I didn't have many skills. I kind of . . . I didn't know . . . I was going by the seat of my pants. It was before I went to graduate school. Then when I came to UMass, it was still-- I don't wanna paint this as a straight line, it wasn't a straight line, it's like, "Oh, I gotta do gender." "Oh, well, what about race?" I mean, it was back and forth, back and forth. And the only people who really got what I was saying were Black people,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

so they were the people who supported me. Again, John and Johnnetta and Esther. And I sat in on African studies courses, I mean, I was immersed to rid myself of my white perspective, modulated, of course, by being Armenian, but undermined totally by wanting to be as white as I possibly could.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I was trying to bring it into all into my courses. But I wasn't a regular faculty member because even when I got my doctorate, it was an Ed.D. and my dissertation was a memoir. There was a big fight about it in the department. Eventually, I did get on the regular faculty, but I wasn't at the time, so I didn't have a

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

lot of power within the department, although I never shut up. So, I guess I was kind of a force. But I didn't see much change. Then I started doing things like incorporating whiteness because of all this stuff about whiteness was coming out. Then I taught a course on the Social Construction of Whiteness and Women. And the great thing about my position in women's studies was I could basically do whatever I wanted.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

So, when I said I'm teaching a course on whiteness, everybody said, "Oh, that's interesting." Very few people asked me about it. It didn't start a discussion in the department. It was something I was doing, and that's how all my race stuff in the department was. It was something I was doing. Mostly. I taught that course for 10 years until Leah got sick, every semester.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

It was really, really interesting for me. I taught it mostly because all this stuff was coming out and I wanted to read it. I thought, well, I'll teach a course. It was fascinating to look at the way that students changed. And then I had a discussion group, not for them to talk about race, but to talk about being white. I had students, former students, kind of as monitors, they're saying, "Well, you're talking about people of color."

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Then I started to get students of color. So, I said, "Well, These discussion groups, the students of color can go anywhere they want, but the white students cannot go into a student of color group, if there is such a thing." The students were saying, well, you're just discriminating. I said, "I cannot ask students of color to listen to white students process their whiteness once a week. I cannot do that." So anyway, it was great fun. It was hard work. I worked so hard for that course, but it was really great fun.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Then when Kimberly Crenshaw's article came, and I always taught June Jordan, always, and Combahee River Collective and then when I became chair, I was able to do what I wanted. At the time I think we were the only women's studies program or one of

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

few that had a majority of women of color working on women of color. So, I kind of didn't have to look over my shoulder anymore, and things were happening. I think I said in my preliminary interview that white women can't be trusted on issues of race. They cannot be, I'm sure you know that, but it needs to be said. And that's why I'm so happy with this book.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

One of the people in my department was Janice Raymond who wrote The Transsexual Empire and she was very anti-trans and an extreme, radical feminist. She was mentored -- Well, she was taught by Mary Daly, and race doesn't matter. We hated each other for, I don't know, 25, 30 years.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And you went on to change the name of the program, is that right?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Yes, I wasn't a prime mover in that I was part of the discussion. I ran the department by consensus, except for who we hired. When we had our first hire, after I was chair, we had an executive committee that made the important decisions in the department, but we also had a few faculty whose lines were in women's studies. So, I

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

met with them and I said, there is not a Black woman on this campus. There's no one on this campus whose research is on Black women. No one, it's like 13, 1400 faculty. And there are very few Black women on this campus teaching regular faculty positions, so I think our next faculty position should be a woman teaching on African American woman.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I went into the executive committee and said, "Our next hire is gonna be --" and somebody said, "Well, what about --" I said, "No, we've decided that's what's happening." So, it was kind of dictatorial, but I didn't care. We hired this wonderful woman Dayo Gore who did amazing research on women in the civil rights movement, really amazing.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You've accomplished so much by the force of your instincts, and I'm wondering what advice would you give to folks who are looking for their path, but haven't yet found their calling?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I think you have to be passionate about what you're doing. You just have to be passionate.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I think for white people, you have to work really hard at that. And I don't mean diversity training at all, I hate diversity training. I really hate it. I think it's politically -- Anyway, I don't wanna spend time talking about that, but I think white people need to know our history,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and we need to know that really well as white people, what happened after the civil war, what did white people do? This is a wonderful book by Carolyn Anderson called White Rage, and it's about every time that Black people, and she's speaking specifically about Black people, make an advance, white people get crazy and they turn it back. And that's exactly what happened in 1877, and before, so that's our history. We need to know that,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and I'm a member of the local hub of the Movement Voter Project, which is an amazing group that supports grassroots groups in communities of color. It's like made for me. I'm just so happy to be working with this group. We raise the money and give it to them and they do their work. So, we thought we'd have a little time after the election to relax a little. I didn't know that we weren't gonna have any time.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

But I said, "It'd be really important for us to have a study group on white supremacy and I'd be willing to help out and put it together." We've read 14 books, a small group of us. It's not the whole group, but I can see people really, really changing and I'm changing. We just finished this book on Not A Nation of Immigrants." I finished the first half and I said, "There's vestiges of the fantasy left in me"

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and I've been doing this forever. That's what white people need to do. So, I speak to whites to work really hard to know your history.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Did you find yourself experiencing homophobia during your career?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I don't know. Because I was so different, my interests were different, it was always harping on racism and white supremacy.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And my academic credentials are not typical, had a big gap. Besides John and Johnnetta, I never really had mentors. I never really had a community of scholars that I was around because I was always different. My dissertation is a memoir.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I don't know, I can't really answer that. And the valley is very -- I mean, it was called Lesbianville USA by the National Enquirer, and it's kind of like San Francisco. I don't know, and not having grown up being a lesbian, I don't have a lot of the antenna out,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

so I'm not a good person to ask about that. And I pass, a lot of people don't know I'm a lesbian. If I think I'm gonna be friends with somebody, I say, "Oh, my partner, Martha." I mean way in the past, and sometimes they would never call me again, so I guess so, but who cares?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's a good filter, right? To see who you can trust. I'm wondering if you could pause for a moment and reflect on the people you've met over the years, who identify as both Armenian and LGBTQ.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Oh, I don't have to reflect on that. Well, there are very few that I know.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

There's this woman, Nancy Agabian -- My book was the first Armenian-American memoir by a woman and also a lesbian. After mine came out, there's this woman who's younger than me, Nancy Agabian, who wrote also, and she identifies as bi, so I knew her.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I'm very close to a young woman named Deanna. I always struggle over her last name. It's a hyphenated name. She is in her thirties and I met her. She's very Armenian-identified. She speaks Armenian. She went to Turkey for her masters and was a student of Ayse's in Istanbul.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And that's the first place she read my book, in Istanbul, can you imagine? This was just a few years ago, maybe five years ago or something like that. My book's been out since '92, so that's how much my book is in circulation. Although I hear from other Armenians. The people I I've met, other just recently, I've met some other gay Armenians. But the people who I know

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

are Deanna and Nancy, and I'm close to Deanna. I've been in a couple of groups since the pandemic where I've met other Armenian lesbians. There's a special issue of the Armenian review on Armenian and lesbians. But Deanna is the one that I'm -- And I'm very close to an Armenian gay man from Armenia. He's like a son,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

we're very close. It was very funny; Deanna did her masters on Nancy's book in my book. And when I went to Istanbul one time, and Deanna was in Ayse's course and I was giving a talk in Ayse course and a bunch of other courses. Deanna gave the presentation on my book.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And Deanna's just furious at the Armenian community. That's why we can be friends, because the Armenian community -- I mean, American community is so conservative, so conservative. I just remembered something else. I'm old, there's a lot of stuff in there. Anyway, Deanna was talking about my book and talking about the Armenian American community

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and she's from Yonkers and Ayse said, "Oh, there's some good things happening." And both Deanna and I are rolling our eyes. We all laugh about that now, here's the Turk saying some good things are happening. Deanna and I are like, 'yeah'. After my book was published, I forgot about this, a couple of Armenian women wanted to meet regularly

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

to have like an Armenian feminist group. And so one of them came to me, quite young too, and she said, "You wanna be part of this group?" And this would be at the end of like 10 years when I tried to relate to Armenian-American organizations, disaster. A disaster. I just gave up. It's like, I can't deal with this, so she said, "Would you like to do this?" I said, "Well, okay." So, we organized it for everybody talking about why they came, and a lot

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

of people came, like 15 or 16 people, I was shocked. That group is still going on, and my book was published in '92. This is probably '92/93. I was with it for eight years and it was amazing. The first meeting, we all went around the room and we described ourselves and I never thought to say that I'm a lesbian, I mean in an Armenian context.

And this young woman says "As an Armenian lesbian" and I went, oh my God. It was so great. But that I wouldn't even think to say that I was a lesbian in this context was just eye opening. It was just great. I've forgotten her name, but I wouldn't tell you anyway, because it was all confidential, but that was really amazing to me.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And Nancy, I think, was involved in organizing a small Armenian gay, lesbian group. I don't know if it's in existence anymore. It's a sparse community and sparse gay lesbian.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I would definitely identify with that sort of splitting up of the pieces of our identity,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

and I'm wondering if you could share what age you felt the freedom that you could a hundred percent be yourself in terms of being able to acknowledge both sides of your Armenian self and your queer identity.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I never really suppressed it. I did to my kids when they were younger but later when Martha and I didn't go to the gay pride

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

march here and Leah called us up and said, "Where are you? I'm here? Where are you?" I said, "Well, we just didn't feel like coming." Too many baby carriages . I don't think I suppressed it in that group. I just couldn't even imagine it. You know what I'm saying? It's different than suppressing it. It's like, okay, now I'm an Armenian. I guess that's what you're asking. So maybe after that,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

when I got older, I just didn't care anymore. I didn't care much before, but now, and after my kids died, I was like, I could do what I want. There are fewer people that I actually interact with. I mean, I have very close friends and I have a community,

but I'm not with people who annoy me or who I don't share politics with. I just don't see them. And it feels great. It feels really great, like cleaning house.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah. I do have some closing questions, but I think this is a good time for us to think about what else you might want to share that we

haven't touched on yet. So, I can leave the next two minutes to you to cover whatever you'd like to talk about.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I've talked a lot.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's the idea.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I just think that that passion thing is really important. I think looking at where you are

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

in terms of social positionalities, because for me as a white person, I got free every time, the fantasy of white supremacy -- White supremacy isn't a fantasy, no. The fantasy of the American dream is fucked. I get freer and you can see things so much clearly.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

If you don't put race in the center of the Western world, you don't understand anything. You cannot understand anything. So, for white people, I'm just speaking to white people now, need to do this work. I think people of color do too, because everybody gets sucked into the American dream.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

It's pernicious, but I can't speak to what people of color need to do, but for white people, you need to read this stuff and it's painful. It's painful, but don't, don't, don't go to a diversity training group, read and listen to Black people and people of color. Listen, there's so much out there, read Tony Morrison, read Gloria Anzaldua. I'm saying her name wrong, but I have for years, read, watch.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

We've referenced a lot of great books. So, thank you. I think that viewers will really appreciate having that resource.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

There's one more book that I just read in our group, which I think is amazing. I read it because my friend, Banu Karaka, in Istanbul told me about it.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

She read me this quote, I can't say the quote exactly, but it's something like this: you and I know all there is to know, what we can't do is have the courage to draw the conclusions that this knowledge lets us do or allows us to do something like that. The book is called Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lvindqvist.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

He's dead now, he's written a lot of books. It's about colonialism and empire and it's devastating and it's only 182 pages, and it's very poetic. It's a very complicated book, but it really does a job. Baldwin; can't ever go wrong reading Baldwin, ever. June Jordan, she's much neglected,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

On Call is one of the greatest books of essays ever. Don't get me started on books.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

well, thank you. This is really great. I'm certainly taking notes as well. Well, we usually close these conversations with a set of questions that we ask everybody. So, you can think of it as a quick tie around.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I have five questions. The first one is, if you could tell your 15-year-old one thing, what would it be?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Don't be afraid.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. What do you think is the best quality of queer people?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Creating new ways to look at things and do things

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

like making new families.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And why is it important to you to tell your story?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Now that's stumping me. Why is that stumping me well, I think I have a story to tell about different aspects of my life and how they're connected together.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Some of the things that I wanna say aren't talked about a lot in the way that I talk about, like being Armenian, that's usually talked about in a nationalist way, like being white, that's usually talked about only in the aspect of attitudes. I'm talking about white as a structure, and that's different. I also think it's important to talk about all of the

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

ups and downs of communities like the lesbian community. I like to look at all sides.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What do you think is the importance of a project like OUTWORDS that's archived LGBTQ stories?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

First of all, I wanna say, I think you're incredibly professional. I am so impressed with the way this interview

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and the process of this interview has gone. With the questionnaire and then the preliminary interview. I've been interviewed a lot and this is really terrific. I think it's important to get the voices that are doing what I just said, is trying to put these parts together, which don't always come together in written stuff and polemics, like who are the people and how do they experience

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

all the parts of themselves, including gay and lesbian part.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's perfect. Thank you. What advice or wisdom would you like to share with the viewers, the LGBTQ folks, listening at home who are coming of age today?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

It's such a different world now. It's so different than when I grew up.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

It's hard to say, but I would say, look for your strengths. I mean, I hear a lot from people who are still teaching about students being really upset about difficult situations. I think that's important to point out, but it's also important to point out what strength you have, what strength you can explore and expand,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and not just look at yourself as a victim. I guess that would be the advice. What I took from my grandmother was that she wasn't a victim, she was a target of a genocide, but she never presented herself as a victim. She said, "I did this. I saved my family." I was listening to Andrea Dworkin, talking about Anita Bryant being a victim because she was a woman.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And I turned to Martha, very shockingly to myself and said, "Not my grandmother." And that started, kind of, this whole exploration of my grandmother's story. I think you need to look at your strength. You need to look at the way the world is trying to victimize you. But if you think -- Here's one, I wanna say one more thing. When I went to Nashville to visit

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

a friend of mine, she took me to Fisk university, a historically Black school. It was established in 1865. 1865. Can you imagine the audacity of Black people just coming out of enslavement, establishing a university, not a normal school. That gives me hope and what Black people are doing now. And other people of color. I focus on Blacks because that's what I know the best,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

but always it's extended to other people of color, but what these groups, grassroots groups are doing now, they're saving us. If we're gonna be saved, they're saving us. Some of these are the most marginalized groups in our society and they have something that is amazing. They have strength and vision. And maybe

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

because essentially, they knew the American dream was full of crap and they could see that. If you can see that, then you can see the country.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Well said, thank you. Thank you for taking us on this journey.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

You're welcome. It was delightful.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I can't help thinking, as you were talking of some things,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I should recommend for you to watch, because first of all, Washington Heights, have you seen the film in the

[inaudible]?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I don't like musicals.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay.

[Inaudible]

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I tried to watch it because it was actually filmed in my neighborhood. It was filmed like a block away from where I lived and I just couldn't watch it. I just didn't like it, wish I had.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

No problem. I feel the same way about musicals.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Yeah. When I saw Fun Home,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I loved that book so much, Alison Bechdel's book, I saw it, I was like, why are they singing? They should be talking. And Martha was saying, of course they're singing. It's a musical.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

It's not for everybody. And then I thought you might get a kick out of this show called The Chair. I think it's on Netflix.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I started to watch it. I thought it was colossally boring, even though I love that actress whose

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

name I can't remember.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Sandra Oh. It gets better.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Oh, it does. Maybe I'll go back to it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

It's a lot of fun. It pays off

[inaudible]. I said if anyone can sort of relate to that environment

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

well, the beginning was very stereotypical. I mean, these characters, not really . It doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of nasty people in academia. I'm not saying that all,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

it's just that these were just too dimensional.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Something that I didn't ask you, but I'll just throw in now because I'm curious: do you feel like you learned as much from your students as from your colleagues?

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

The whiteness class, I learned a lot from watching them.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

And when I had the discussion leaders -- Well, the monitors, the people who led these one-credit things they had to do every week, it was fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Because one thing they would get mad at the students. They were furious with the students and they were really good students, these discussion leaders, and I said to them, one of them like, what's the problem, they're learning. What is your problem? Are you jealous of them because they get to be

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

in this group every week? She said, yeah, I am. I said, well, you need to deal with that. You need to find a way where you can, because I think white people who begin to learn about what it means to be white are very lonely. I was. I mean, I talk to Black people all the time and to Indians, actually,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

and other people of color, but I didn't have white people to talk to for a long, long time. When I find one, I'm like, I love you, because it's something we can share as whites, it's terrific, but it's rare. It's really rare.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah, not everybody's done the work to evolve in the way that you have.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Relatively few white people have,

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

I would say, relatively few, but I have a lot of faith in the younger generation. I mean the people who are out on the streets, not all younger generations, but people are out on the streets. If you can take direction from people of color you've made a big step because we always wanna tell people what to do. We whites.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Well, thank you so much for everything that you've shared. I'm really thrilled with how this has gone. And I believe that the next step is that you'll receive a transcript of the conversation and you can approve or not all the parts of it. I think I hand over now to Astra.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

Okay, very nice to meet you, Lucy. Lovely

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Lovely to meet you. Thank you.

ARLENE AVAKIAN:

What's your last name?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Mukerjee.